While I’ve only officially been a Product Manager for a few years off and on, I’ve worked with some of the best PMs at Twilio, Okta, ngrok, and now Pangea. I’ve conducted interviews with customers ranging from small one-man startups that are a vague idea to Fortune 50 companies with brand names you have around your house.*
One thing that doesn’t change regardless of the customer, product, or industry is how you treat feedback on our products. Some people will hear feedback and leap to “fix” their product.
It’s fundamentally a bad approach.
When you get feedback from a customer, it might be about your product, how they perceive your product, their process, or how they mapped their process to your product. There’s a mishmash of information in there. Sometimes you can find useful nuggets but you’re more likely to find a ball of Christmas lights where you know there’s a beginning and end but you have no chance of finding them. Instead, I try to focus customer interviews around variations of two questions:
- What do you do now?
- Why do you do it that way?
Then I fit every answer into this model: Regulation > Requirement > Preference > Practice
Regulation
The first and most important reason to perform a task is due to regulations. Regulations are simply laws or policies that apply to your business or industry. Further, there are often fines or other punishment if you don’t meet these regulations.
If a customer says “we do this to comply with [law X]”, don’t screw around with it. Even if you think their interpretation is wrong, that’s not your battle to fight. It’s not something you can shift them on. Instead, figure out if your product makes compliance easier or – if it doesn’t – that you don’t make it worse.
Requirement
Requirements are quite a bit different. When a customer says they have a specific requirement, dig in and understand its source, its flexibility, and how it applies to your product. As you explore requirements, you’ll find that many split into two pieces: the requirement and the practices to meet it. Sometimes both will still be set in stone and non-negotiable. That’s fine. But sometimes you’ll discover that the practices were created by the customer and is completely flexible.
Practice
Once we’re into Practices, we’re in a radically different game. Here we have flexibility in the rules and how we fulfill them and our challenges become less technical or legal and entirely human. Yes, that means we have to understand the person, what they do, and how they got to this practice.
Sometimes we’ll discover that their process has worked the same way for decades and they just transposed a paper-based approach to the internet. I once worked with a team that would write work orders into a web form, print out two copies, and send them off with the field technicians. The field technicians would throw away the paper, open their phones, and read the order. Once I discovered this, I made a mobile-friendly view and we skipped the printing.
Preference
Finally, we have preferences. Preferences are the bane of every product team’s existence because every preference is initially treated as a requirement. Even once you figure out it’s not a requirement, you can get into a quagmire of font size, button placement, and more – and worse – you get constantly conflicting preferences all described as requirements. It can be informative and infuriating all at once.
So now what do we do?
Now that we have a model – Regulation > Requirement > Practice > Preference – we can categorize and even rank each of the bits of feedback based on our product vision and goals of the organization.
If we’re building a consumer social media product, we’ll have some privacy regulations and a few hard requirements but most of our effort should be focused on making more things fun, easy, and engaging. Alternatively, if we’re building healthcare apps, we’ll have numerous privacy, data protection, and more regulations but “fun and easy” probably isn’t on our list.
It all comes down to:
The better we can understand and organize a customer’s feedback to act on it, the better our products will be.
* Fun story: One time I visited the doctor’s office and noticed a Waste Management dumpster in the parking lot. Then I went to check in at the office and it was an AthenaHealth kiosk. In the exam room, some of the supplies were from McKesson. Finally, on the way out, I saw a FedEx truck. All four were Okta customers I’d worked with.